In recent years, cell-phones and mobile terminals each being equipped with an image pickup apparatus are in widespread use, which results from higher performance and downsizing of an image pickup apparatus employing a solid-state image pickup element such as a CCD (Charge Coupled Device) type image sensor or a CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) type image sensor. Further, for the image pickup lens mounted on these image pickup apparatuses (each being called a camera module), there are increasing demands for further higher performance in addition to further downsizing, because the solid-state image pickup element includes the larger number of pixels. As an image pickup lens for this application, there has been suggested an image pickup lens of a three-element structure type because it has advantages that higher performance can be achieved and downsizing is not interrupted, compared with a lens of a single-element type or of a two-element type.
As this image pickup lens of a three-element structure type, there is known the so-called triplet type image pickup lens that is composed of a positive first lens in a meniscus shape whose convex surface faces an object, a negative second lens in a meniscus shape whose concave surface faces an object and a third lens having positive refractive power, in the order from the object, as disclosed in, for example, Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (JP-A) No. 2006-133270.
Further, there is known an image pickup lens aiming downsizing of the total length (a distance on an optical axis from the lens surface closest to the object side in the total image pickup system to the image-side focal point) that is composed of a positive first lens whose convex surface faces an object, a negative second lens whose convex surface faces an object and a positive third lens whose convex surface faces an object, in the order from the object as disclosed in, for example, Patent Document 2: JP-A No. 2005-308800.